Melville is a sea fir, the curve of the keel
springs from his branches, an arm
of timber and ship. Whitman impossible to count
as grain, Poe in his mathematical
darkness, Dreiser, Wolfe,
fresh wounds of our own absence,
Lockridge more recently, all bound to the depths,
how many others, bound to the darkness:
over them the same dawn of the hemisphere burns,
and out of them what we are has come.

...which had no boundaries in time and space, where lurked
musical and strange names and mythical and lost peoples, and
which was itself only a name musical and strange.

ROSS LOCKRIDGE, Jr.

Boston 1948

"Once long ago when I reread
Raintree County,I had a momentary
impulse to write a literary critique, something I never do, to
be called 'He Came, and Ye Knew Him Not.' By him I meant
the author of 'the great American novel.'" --From "Raintree
County Sixty Years Later: A Remembrance" by Herman Wouk,
Forward to the Chicago Review Press edition. (more)

"An achievement
of art and purpose, a cosmically brooding book full of significance
and beauty." -The New York Times

"Like
the environmental novels of the last (2) decade(s) [Edward Abbey,
The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Arfive
(1971), and Jack Schaefer, Mavericks (1967)], Raintree
County calls, ultimately, for a perception of space and place
that is neither national nor social, but rather is ecological--the
perception that person and place, space and time, are interdependent
and one. It is an ecological novel written before its time, and
its time has finally come." -Fred Erisman, Markham Review

"No myth
is more imposing than the Great American Novel; but if it is
truly unattainable, I believe that Ross Lockridge, Jr. made closer
approach than any other writer has, before or since." -Larry
Swindell, syndicated Books Editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
July 26, 1998.

"No wonder critics of the day could not, or would not, understand
the novel. . . Lockridge could see all too well what was happening
to his beloved country. (Also ahead of time, and unappreciated,
was his fear for the natural environment of Raintree County,
his sense that America was under attack from railroad tracks
and smokestacks.)
Larry Lockridge says his father
hoped the novel would remind people of the original promise of
America, 'still alive though stunted.'" --Complete
review: Marcia
Abramson, Detroit Free Press

"My favorite
novel of all time is Raintree County. It's about American
journalism, patriotism, and a star-crossed love affair a hundred
years ago. Like the Bible, you can pick it up, read any page,
and gain something. It's poetry. Forget the movie, if you saw
it, the book is something entirely different." -Edna Buchanan,
author, You Only Die Twice and Cold Case Squad.
Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for general reporting
at the Miami Herald.

"The powerful currents and depth of this great swollen river
of a book remain irresistible. Raintree County doesn't have to
be the great American novel to be an American classic and a classic
expression of the American dream; a time and place in our history
are made permanent in this book." -Complete review:
Richard Dyer, Boston
Globe

"Just
how good is Raintree County? . . . Looking back at it,
one is struck by the strength of its prose and the life of its
characters. The Civil War section alone, well over 200 pages
and the heart of the book, justifies the extravagant Great American
Novel claims some critics have made for it. . . . Had Ross Lockridge,
Jr. lived, he might well have changed the direction of American
writing-for that, and nothing less, was his intention."
-Bruce Cook, Chicago Tribune

Raintree County
is "a work that should rank with Thomas Wolfe's Look
Homeward, Angel as a landmark in American fiction."
Ross Lockridge, Jr. attempted to "write the great American
encyclopedic novel, one that absorbs all the modern literary
devices of his day and breathes them forth refashioned on a wind
from Walt Whitman." -Donald Newlove, Philadelphia
Inquirer.

"[An]
extraordinary work . . . I have reread Raintree County
at least once a year. It is a book that I, at least, have grown
into, still grow into." -Robin Mather, Detroit News

"[A]t
the end of the century, when lists were propounded identifying
the great novels of the epoch.... Raintree County was
an egregious omission. . . . Lockridge himself once wrote of
Victor Hugo's Les Miserables: 'This immense work, full
of interminable descriptions, digressions, superfluous episodes,
offering us realism, romanticism, sentimentality, artificiality,
lyricism, satire -- in short, everything -- manages even because
of this amplitude to give a sensation of epic nobility and diverse
genius.' The description applies to Raintree County. .
. . The sheer ambition, to create a kind of Ulysses embodying
America, embraces the reader at the beginning and doesn't let
up. It has a Whitmanesque exuberance." -Dick Cady, Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist, The Herald-Times, March 4, 2001

Raintree County
"still holds up well. In fact, the book's views on women's
rights, on ecology and other current issues help make a convincing
case that Lockridge was simply writing a generation ahead of
his time. . . The book was made to suffer as a literary work
because of its popularity. . . Lockridge has been dead now for
nearly half a century. Perhaps this time around, his novel will
find its intended audience." -William Lutholtz,
Indianapolis News

"Scores of characters flit through its pages, characters
that a Hogarth or a Bruegel might have assembled on canvas, characters
that suggest both Whitmanian energies and Dickensian drolleries,
and characters that have a fey poetic charm. . . The sheer sparkle
and dazzle of things holds and compels. . . But I trust eventually
the great appeal of the book lies in its visionary prose, in
its architectonics, and in its narratology. It is not surprising
to see the language acquire wings and take off as though possessed,
wanting to reach out to the extremities of human thought and
experience." -Complete review: Darshan Maini,The Tribune
of India

"Many
had tried to write the great American novel. Few had been told
during their own lifetimes, and especially so young, that they
had succeeded. . . For Ross Lockridge as a young man worked with
a drivenness, day and night, trying always to be bigger than
big, including not only all of the mythology of America in its
pastoral singing, but all of the mythology of all time. . . [The
novel's sadness] seems to come more from a cosmic anticipation
than an actual knowledge, or perhaps from a deep spiritual knowledge,
rooted in his family history and his bones." -Erika
Duncan, The New York Times

Raintree County
is "a book that many people--including myself--believed
was the closest any work had ever approached the mythical goal
of the Great American Novel." -Leonard Duckett, Fort
Worth Star-Telegram

"I would
argue that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit
of writing-- the place where coherence begins and words stand
a chance of becoming more than mere words. If the moment of quickening
is to come, it comes at the level of the paragraph. It is a marvelous
and flexible instrument that can be a single word long or run
on for pages (one paragraph in Don Robertson's historical novel
Paradise Falls is sixteen pages long; there are pages
in Ross Lockridge's Raintree County which are nearly that).
You must learn to use it well if you are to write well. What
this means is a lot of practice; you have to learn the beat."
-Stephen King, ON WRITING, Scribner, 2000, p.134. [Such
long paragraphs actually are not to be found in the novel, but
Stephen King's remembrance is itself testament to their solid
relatedness, rhythm, or quickening. --RLIII, RC.com]

"The republication of Raintree County and the publication
of Shade of the Raintree are indeed the most important literary
publications of 1994 . . . In these two publications, a remarkable,
perhaps even a great literary work will continue to live in spite
of the vagaries of literary fashion, popular taste, or literary
celebrity. If Raintree County is not the fabled Great American
Novel, it will do until that unlikely work appears. . . Evident
at once in re-reading the novel is not only the durability of
the characters and the myth that Ross Lockridge created, but
the elements that make the novel even more timely in 1994 than
it was in 1948." -Complete review: David Anderson, Director,
The Center for the Study of Midwestern Literature and Culture